Kitchen & Bath Business - November/December 2019 - 60

SOLUTIONS

Permitting Pains

Working with multiple
guidelines & restrictions in
an extensive condo project

A FORMER CLIENT WAS PLANNING to move out of her house in Orlando

and into a nearby condo.The entire space needed a serious renovation, which
included four bathrooms, a kitchen and all of the flooring. Because so much
square footage of the condo would be under construction (95 percent), designer Chris Druschel of S&W Kitchens had to overcome multiple permitting hurdles in this Level 1 project.
"We had one month to design, select and price this entire project, which
required a whole different set of guidelines," he explained. "For example, I
had to show an emergency escape plan for the condo, which is unusual for
our process, where I drew arrows from each room that led to the exit, and all
doorways needed a minimum of a 32-in. opening."

ABOVE This intense condo

project required the renovation of the kitchen and four
bathrooms. The space was
complicated by various ceiling
heights, so several walls were
removed, and soﬃts were
raised. Druschel said he and
his team had to make several
decisions on the ﬂy because of
all the restrictions.

CHALLENGE 1: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

The client's home is on the fourth floor of a residential condo building, which
Druschel said was the main cause for complications and added about 20 percent
extra to the design team's anticipated schedule.A lot of condo buildings have a special service elevator for transporting trash,etc.,up and down,but this one did not.
"Because the elevator is shared with tenants, we were only allowed to bring
one garbage can of debris down each ride," said the designer. "Once at the
bottom, it was a 1,000-ft. trek to the closest truck of ours to unload/dump."
Druschel's solution to this challenge was what he calls a steady stream
of constant people power bringing down some 29 tons of trash from the
demolition nonstop.

By CHELSIE BUTLER

"This process took just as long as applying the
special finishes throughout the condo," he added
and explained that because of his company's years
of experience, the design team was able to project
these delays ahead of time.
CHALLENGE 2: REDUCING NOISE

With condo bylaws, sometimes the hardest obstacle can be having to work specific hours and
only parking in certain spots. With this project,
the biggest hurdle was the short time frame the
team was given to remove the flooring because
of the noise disturbance it would cause for the
homeowners below.
"The condo association only allowed us five
business days to remove 3,000 square feet of mudset travertine and glued hard wood," said Druschel."We rented a floor-removing, Zamboni-style
machine with a scraping shovel to make sure we
hit the deadline, which we barely achieved."
The association was not planning to allow the
team any leverage on the five days, so this was
another all-hands-on-deck charge, and it proved
successful - even though the Terminator floorremoval machine barely made the weight restriction on the elevator. Also because of the noise their
work would cause, some of the tradespeople had
to do things like cut cabinets at their own homes
instead of inside the condo or on the balcony.

/ NOV.-DEC. 2019 / KBBONLINE.COM / The official publication of NKBA (NKBA.org) and KBIS (KBIS.com)

http://www.KBBONLINE.COM http://www.NKBA.org http://www.KBIS.com

Kitchen & Bath Business - November/December 2019

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